Lucian's Lover of Lies and the Corinthian Spectres

The Sceptic’s Catalogue

The Syrian-born satirist Lucian of Samosata, writing in Greek in the latter half of the second century AD, composed a dialogue entitled Philopseudes, “the lover of lies,” which has survived as one of the richest catalogues of paranormal anecdote from the entire ancient world. The text is presented as a rationalist exposure of credulity. Tychiades, the speaker who frames the dialogue, complains to his friend Philocles that he has just escaped from the house of the elderly Eucrates, where a gathering of supposedly learned men, a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, a physician, and Eucrates himself, spent the afternoon trading the most absurd ghost stories Tychiades had ever heard.

Lucian’s intent is plainly mocking. Yet the satirical frame has the unintended effect of preserving, in vivid detail, exactly the sort of ghost-lore that circulated among educated provincial Greeks in the period. What Lucian wished to ridicule, modern readers can mine as evidence of a coherent and widespread paranormal tradition.

The House of the Pythagorean

The most extended of the haunted-house stories in the dialogue is told by Arignotus, the Pythagorean philosopher. He describes a house in Corinth, in the precinct of the temple of Cranaius, which had stood empty and shuttered for many years. Stories were told of nocturnal disturbances. Tenants who took the lease either fled within days or fell ill and died. The house had passed entirely out of the rental market.

Arignotus, having come to Corinth to consult certain books in the city’s library, asked specifically to be lodged in this house. His Egyptian training in occult letters, he claimed, had prepared him for such encounters. He carried with him a collection of sacred texts written in hieratic script. His host gave him the keys with reluctance.

He took the most dilapidated of the rooms, lit a single lamp, and began to read. After some time the air in the room grew heavy. A shape appeared at the door, indistinct at first, then taking the form of a great savage dog. The dog advanced. Arignotus, unmoved, opened one of his Egyptian books and began to read aloud the most dreadful and ancient of his charms. The dog transformed. It became a bull. It became a lion. It became, finally, a dark and shaggy form that the philosopher could not afterwards describe with any precision. At each transformation Arignotus continued his recitation. The figure retreated, sank into the floor of the courtyard, and was gone.

In the morning, exactly in the spot where the apparition had vanished, Arignotus directed the household slaves to dig. They uncovered, at no great depth, a skeleton. The bones were collected, removed, and given proper burial. The house, Arignotus concluded, was thereafter quiet.

A Familiar Pattern

The structural identity of Arignotus’s story with the Athenodorus account preserved a generation earlier by Pliny the Younger is unmistakable. A philosopher, a haunted house, a ritual confrontation, an exhumation of bones in the courtyard, and the cessation of phenomena. The recurrence of the pattern across two writers of different cultural backgrounds, writing for different audiences, has long puzzled historians of the paranormal. Either a single literary template circulated widely and was applied to local stories with appropriate modifications, or the underlying phenomenon, of restless dead seeking proper burial, produced consistent reports across the Mediterranean.

For more on this pattern in the ancient and medieval world, see our entry on the unquiet dead tradition and on the recurring motif of the exhumation and reburial as remedy for haunting.

The Other Stories

Lucian fills the dialogue with further examples. Eucrates himself relates how, in his garden one evening, he saw the goddess Hecate appear, three-headed and surrounded by serpentine attendants, opening the earth at his feet to reveal a glimpse of Hades. The Stoic Cleodemus describes how a young man named Glaucias was healed of love-sickness by a Hyperborean magician, who summoned the figure of Eros, called up the deceased father of Glaucias from the underworld for permission, and animated a clay figurine of the beloved girl which then fetched her in person to the lovers’ assignation.

A character named Ion, the Platonist, describes a Syrian exorcist who specialised in cases of demonic possession, commanding the spirits to depart from the bodies of the afflicted and to give some visible sign of their exit. Ion claims to have personally witnessed such a sign, with a black smoke issuing from a young man’s mouth and a stone statue at the courtyard wall splitting at the moment of departure.

Why the Sceptic Preserved Them

Lucian’s purpose was not to verify these accounts but to expose what he saw as the credulity of the Greek philosophical class. Yet he was, by literary necessity, obliged to present the stories with sufficient detail to make their telling plausible within the dialogue’s frame. The result is a document that is simultaneously satirical and ethnographic. The stories are clearly familiar to the dialogue’s interlocutors. They are told without surprise, as though drawing from a common stock.

This common stock is what is most valuable for the historian of the paranormal. Lucian shows us that, in the second-century Greek-speaking Mediterranean, accounts of shape-shifting spectres, of necromantic resurrections, of exorcistic confrontations, of bone exhumations and the quieting of houses, circulated widely enough among educated men that a satirist could deploy them as the substance of his joke. The phenomena, whatever their nature, were not marginal. They were part of the texture of cultivated conversation.

A Document of Its Own Defeat

The Philopseudes survives because subsequent generations of readers found it useful. Ironically, much of that usefulness lay in the very stories Lucian wished to discredit. Christian writers from the fourth century onward cited the dialogue’s accounts of pagan exorcism as evidence that demons had operated in the world before the coming of Christ. Renaissance occultists from Ficino onward read it as a sourcebook of late-antique magical practice. The Society for Psychical Research in the late nineteenth century returned to Lucian as one of the earliest documented compendia of haunting phenomena.

The Pythagorean’s house in Corinth, the bones in the courtyard, the dog that became a bull and then a lion, all preserved by a satirist’s pen for the purpose of mockery, stand as some of the most detailed paranormal narratives the second century has left us.

Sources

• Lucian of Samosata, Philopseudes, sections 16, 30-31, 34-36.
• Daniel Ogden, In Search of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The Traditional Tales of Lucian’s Lover of Lies (Swansea, 2007).
• Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, “Lucian’s Introduction to Lover of Lies,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 39 (1998).
• Debbie Felton, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (Texas, 1999).
• Christopher P. Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian (Harvard, 1986).